Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 5

[smcder]

I dont want to get off track but introspection is a key topic ... here are two interesting links:

http://journalpsyche.org/articles/0xc109.pdf

Science: Specific Brain Region Linked to Introspective Thoughts | AAAS - The World's Largest General Scientific Society

I have fairly good internet speed at the moment, I'll see if I can find some video.

 

[smcder]

I've got the website started ... one of the topics is avian intelligence ... birds have apparently evolved an equivalent to the mammalian neocortex, only it's much smaller so that it's much lighter because birds have to conserve weight ... the crux of it is, if this evolved independently and birds have self-awareness (mirror test) and there are no zombie birds ... then do we have one more question about epiphenomenalism?

 

[Constance]

Having run across this issue ( infinite regress ) or as I prefer to call it recursion, in my own meditations, my present view is best framed in the form of the question: "Am I conscious of my consciousness?".

You mean 'am I conscious of being conscious'? Yes, consciousness of one's consciousness is what is first recognized in what phenomenologists refer to as 'reflective consciousness', which emerges from prereflective consciousness and brings along with it prior sensed {and to an extent 'thought'} experience of being in the world prereflectively. By virtue of prereflective consciousness we are always already oriented to our situation in an environment of things and others when we first begin to reflect on what-is as including our situated presence in a sensable world that we have access to. The passage into reflective consciousness does not lead to an infinite regress. It leads to the recognition that one possesses and sustains a core point of view in motion in the world we move about it in, and that this point of view seems to be inescapable.

If Michael Allen is correct, higher-order thought and reflection can produce the sense of a potentially infinite regress beyond our situated consciousness. That is, one interested in doing so can construct or imagine a series of ever expanding boxes containing additional speculated relations of what is thinkable about the self-world and subject-object relations from the basic givenness of the reflexivity of consciousness -- its ability to think about its [our] thinking. How far can such mental gymnastics go? And can they go so far that they lead to thorough alienation from the embodied self whose consciousness is being explored? One question I want to ask is 'what would be the value of pursuing this experiment?' Another question I have is 'what is the motivation for pursuing it?'.

One possible answer to the latter question is that the ambiguity of consciousness has become unendurably frustrating to the seeker who wants to pin it down in a dissecting tray and see it how it's put together, to understand the whole structure of its proliferating activities. It seems to me that the ambiguity of consciousness and the extent of its unknown abilities and knowledge are both part of 'what-is' for conscious beings. There are limits to the extent to which we can 'scope out' the scope of the open-endedness and creativity of consciousness. My own response, rather than analyzing my consciousness, is to accept it as it is, using it, living in and through it by virtue of the openness to the world, and my consequent experience in the world, that it provides.

 

[Constance]

I dont want to get off track but introspection is a key topic ... here are two interesting links:

http://journalpsyche.org/articles/0xc109.pdf

I think this is an article of major significance and a must-read for this thread. Excellent find, Steve.

 

[Constance]

More progress . . .

Front Psychol. 2014; 5: 334.
Published online 2014 Apr 29. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00334

Harnessing psychoanalytical methods for a phenomenological neuroscience
Emma P. Cusumano1 and Amir Raz2,*

Abstract
Psychoanalysis proffers a wealth of phenomenological tools to advance the study of consciousness. Techniques for elucidating the structures of subjective life are sorely lacking in the cognitive sciences; as such, experiential reporting techniques must rise to meet both complex theories of brain function and increasingly sophisticated neuroimaging technologies. Analysis may offer valuable methods for bridging the gap between first-person and third-person accounts of the mind. Using both systematic observational approaches alongside unstructured narrative interactions, psychoanalysts help patients articulate their experience and bring unconscious mental contents into awareness. Similar to seasoned meditators or phenomenologists, individuals who have undergone analysis are experts in discerning and describing their subjective experience, thus making them ideal candidates for neurophenomenology. Moreover, analytic techniques may provide a means of guiding untrained experimental participants to greater awareness of their mental continuum, as well as gathering subjective reports about fundamental yet elusive aspects of experience including selfhood, temporality, and inter-subjectivity. Mining psychoanalysis for its methodological innovations provides a fresh turn for the neuropsychoanalysis movement and cognitive science as a whole – showcasing the integrity of analysis alongside the irreducibility of human experience.

Keywords: phenomenology of consciousness, phenomenology, first-person perspective, subjective experience, neuroscience methods

"This paper illustrates how the marriage of phenomenology and psychoanalysis can inform the scientific study of consciousness. In particular, we outline the potential psychoanalysis holds as a tool for fostering different states of awareness and gathering experiential accounts for the purposes of cognitive neuroscience. Methods for elucidating the structures of phenomenal experience are scantily present in the landscape composing the cognitive sciences. This lacuna – a palpable gap between subjective and objective techniques – calls for expert methods to discern and describe experience from first and second person perspectives. While readily embracing psychodynamic theory, proponents of the neuropsychoanalysis movement have largely overlooked the methods inherent to analysis. A central aspect of the psychoanalytic approach, the unstructured narrative interaction forms the backbone of analysis. Though unconventional in the context of experimental neuropsychology, to disparage the narrative dynamic would cripple the research potential of psychoanalysis (Bazan, 2011). For example, cognitive scientists stand to benefit from narrative approaches to guide participants to uncover unconscious aspects of their experience, cultivate meta-awareness, and elicit descriptive firsthand reports. Here we argue that viewing psychoanalysis as a method for elucidating subjective experience best motivates collaboration between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Sketching the crux of contemporary neuropsychoanalysis, we highlight the relative merits of a crosstalk with the critical neuroscience movement of neurophenomenology. We conclude by discussing how the development of new phenomenological techniques may leverage psychoanalytic methods in the clinical and experimental study of consciousness."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The following are extracts from the article Steve linked that I'd copied into my posting screen. They got copied into this post by accident, but I'll keep them here for their insights.

"it is widely held that frontal activation reflects, and is dependent upon, the goals and strategies adopted by the subject [8,34,35].

"(5) Attentional processes [47]: introspective reports present the most direct method of assessing the ‘foreground and background’of attention, and the temporal sequence of its ‘flights and perchings’, to use James’s terms [1]. Lutz et al. [48]"

"At the very least, this should encourage experimenters to think more carefully before they speculate about the relevance of their objective measures to ‘awareness’ or other subjective phenomena. At best, retrospective reports will considerably enrich experimenters’ understanding of ‘what it is like’[61] to do the task, potentially revealing unexpected and important experiential phenomena. Experimenters can then frame detailed hypotheses regarding these phenomena, which can be tested using ‘tailored’ introspective methodologies."

"As the biologist Seymour Kety noted, ‘Nature is an elusive quarry, and it is foolhardy to pursue her with one eye closed and one foot hobbled’[65]."

 

[Randall]

I think we have to be cautious with introspection - this was Ramachandran's concern. Is brain scanning able to tell us anything about this process?

Hypothetically, if one were to ask the question using language, "Am I conscious of my own consciousness?" and hold that question in short memory in order for it to become the focus of one's consciousness, or pre-reflective self-consciousness ( to use @Constance's phenomenological jargon ), an active brain scan should be able to detect increased activity between the central executive part of the prefrontal cortex and Broca's area. Maybe there's some research where it's already been done. I don't know. I know that they eventually did do the research that proved a theory I had held for years based on logical analysis, that the generic notion of free will ( that free will is our ability to consciously choose ), is in fact illusory, that proof being that brains scans clearly show that decisions are formed before we become consciously aware of them.

 

[smcder]

You mean 'am I conscious of being conscious'? Yes, consciousness of one's consciousness is what is first recognized in what phenomenologists refer to as 'reflective consciousness', which emerges from prereflective consciousness and brings along with it prior sensed {and to an extent 'thought'} experience of being in the world prereflectively. By virtue of prereflective consciousness we are always already oriented to our situation in an environment of things and others when we first begin to reflect on what-is as including our situated presence in a sensable world that we have access to. The passage into reflective consciousness does not lead to an infinite regress. It leads to the recognition that one possesses and sustains a core point of view in motion in the world we move about it in, and that this point of view seems to be inescapable.

If Michael Allen is correct, higher-order thought and reflection can produce the sense of a potentially infinite regress beyond our situated consciousness. That is, one interested in doing so can construct or imagine a series of ever expanding boxes containing additional speculated relations of what is thinkable about the self-world and subject-object relations from the basic givenness of the reflexivity of consciousness -- its ability to think about its [our] thinking. How far can such mental gymnastics go? And can they go so far that they lead to thorough alienation from the embodied self whose consciousness is being explored? One question I want to ask is 'what would be the value of pursuing this experiment?' Another question I have is 'what is the motivation for pursuing it?'.

One possible answer to the latter question is that the ambiguity of consciousness has become unendurably frustrating to the seeker who wants to pin it down in a dissecting tray and see it how it's put together, to understand the whole structure of its proliferating activities. It seems to me that the ambiguity of consciousness and the extent of its unknown abilities and knowledge are both part of 'what-is' for conscious beings. There are limits to the extent to which we can 'scope out' the scope of the open-endedness and creativity of consciousness. My own response, rather than analyzing my consciousness, is to accept it as it is, using it, living in and through it by virtue of the openness to the world, and my consequent experience in the world, that it provides.

Just because you can set two mirrors up to show on another in infinite regress doesn't mean you get an accurate reflection of the world.

It reminds me of the little joke about Borges ... that he wrote his manuscripts in recursive.

 

[smcder]

Hypothetically, if one were to ask the question using language, "Am I conscious of my own consciousness?" and hold that question in short memory in order for it to become the focus of one's consciousness, an active brain scan should be able to detect increased activity between the central executive part of the prefrontal cortex and Broca's area. Maybe there's some research where it's already been done. I don't know. I know that they eventually did do the research that proved a theory I had held for years based on logical analysis, that the generic notion of free will ( that free will is our ability to consciously choose ), is in fact illusory, that proof being that brains scans clearly show that decisions are formed before we become consciously aware of them.

Can you link me to those experiments?

 

[Randall]

Can you link me to those experiments?

Maybe later, but in the meantime it's not too hard to Google for them either. They're now fairly well known. Here's an example: Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will

 

[smcder]

Hypothetically, if one were to ask the question using language, "Am I conscious of my own consciousness?" and hold that question in short memory in order for it to become the focus of one's consciousness, an active brain scan should be able to detect increased activity between the central executive part of the prefrontal cortex and Broca's area. Maybe there's some research where it's already been done. I don't know. I know that they eventually did do the research that proved a theory I had held for years based on logical analysis, that the generic notion of free will ( that free will is our ability to consciously choose ), is in fact illusory, that proof being that brains scans clearly show that decisions are formed before we become consciously aware of them.

Maybe later, but in the meantime it's not too hard to Google for them either. They're now fairly well known.

It's a complex topic - there have been a number of such studies the experiments conducted by Benjamin Libet are perhaps the most discussed and are the ones I'm most familiar with, but I think they are along the same lines as you are talking about ... we talked about the Libet experiments on this thread, maybe in Part 2? I'll do a search and see ... so I'm looking for the specific research you are referring to ... there is ambiguity as to what free will means and the experiments I'm familiar with have been subject to some range of interpretation.

For example, from the Wikipedia article:

Neuroscience of free will - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The other studies described below have only just begun to shed light on the role that consciousness plays in actions and it is too early to draw very strong conclusions about certain kinds of "free will".

It is worth noting that such experiments – so far – have dealt only with free will decisions made in short time frames (seconds) and may not have direct bearing on free will decisions made ("thoughtfully") by the subject over the course of many seconds, minutes, hours or longer.

Scientists have also only so far studied extremely simple behaviors (e.g. moving a finger).
Adina Roskies points out five areas of neuroscientific research: 1.) action initiation, 2.) intention, 3). decision, 4.) Inhibition and control, and 5.) the phenomenology of agency, and for each of these areas Roskies concludes that the science may be developing our understanding of volition or "will," but it yet offers nothing for developing the "free" part of the "free will" discussion.

So it seems that in order to understand and assess the claims you made in your post, we need a specific definition of free will and we need to look at the specific experiments you are referring to and see if they address concerns such as the above and we need to see the logical analysis you performed.

The limitations that seem to be of most immediate concern in terms of generalizing to larger ideas of "free will" are that the experiments have involved simple behaviors made in short time frames.

This is from the same article ... it's a succinct statement of the Buddhist idea of free will, I've actually been trying to think of a short way to put it for several days, I think this does the job.

"Human agency, the ability to affect the surrounding world, may be a result not so simply of conscious choice – but instead a result of training unconscious habits beforehand."

 

[smcder]

Maybe later, but in the meantime it's not too hard to Google for them either. They're now fairly well known. Here's an example: Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will

The last section of this article raises some additional concerns:

Back in 2010, W. R. Klemm published an analysis in which he complained about the ways in which the data was being interpreted, and what he saw as grossly oversimplified experimentation.

Others have criticized the timing judgements, arguing about the short timeframes between action and movement, and how attention to aspects of timing were likely creating distortions in the data.

It's also possible that the brain regions being studied, namely the pre-SMA/SMA and the anterior cingulate motor areas of the brain, may only be responsible for the late stages of motor planning; it's conceivable that other higher brain systems might be better candidates for exerting will.

Also, test subjects — because of the way the experiments were set up — may have been influenced by other "choice-predictive" signals; the researchers may have been measuring brain activity not directly related to the experiment itself.

The jury, it would appear, is still out on the question of free will. While the neuroscientists are clearly revealing some important insights into human thinking and decision making, more work needs to be done to make it more convincing.

What would really settle the issue would be the ability for neuroscientists to predict the actual outcome of more complex decisions prior to the subject being aware of it themselves. That would, in a very true sense, prove that free will is indeed an illusion.

Furthermore, neuroscientists also need to delineate between different types of decision-making. Not all decisions are the same; moving a finger or pressing a button is very different than contemplating the meaning of life, or preparing the words for a big speech. Given the limited nature of the experiments to date (which are focused on volitional physical movements), this would certainly represent a fruitful area for inquiry.

 

[Constance]

Hypothetically, if one were to ask the question using language, "Am I conscious of my own consciousness?" and hold that question in short memory in order for it to become the focus of one's consciousness, or pre-reflective self-consciousness ( to use @Constance's phenomenological jargon ), an active brain scan should be able to detect increased activity between the central executive part of the prefrontal cortex and Broca's area. Maybe there's some research where it's already been done. I don't know. I know that they eventually did do the research that proved a theory I had held for years based on logical analysis, that the generic notion of free will ( that free will is our ability to consciously choose ), is in fact illusory, that proof being that brains scans clearly show that decisions are formed before we become consciously aware of them.

I doubt that brain scans can determine that 'decisions have been formed' by subjects, though the fMRI likely does recognize that decision-making is in process. Look up 'readiness potentials'. What the brain scans you refer to likely show is the forming of an intention to react or decide. Libet's response to those who read his experimental results as proof of no free will in consciousness was to point out that the experiments could not measure 'free won't' -- a conscious decision such as we've all experienced not to follow through with an impulse to do or say something. The subjects in those experiments were set up, oriented, for a stimulus-response test and were thus primed to be ready to respond as soon as the cue to respond was sensed. The conscious ability to veto an action one has initiated, as Libet pointed out, is unquestionably an example of free will.


addendum: Your reference to "Constance's phenomenological jargon," intended to bite me, actually turns out to bite you, revealing again your refusal to seriously engage the subject matter of this thread. If you insist on trivializing terminology you don't recognize, much less understand, what do you hope to accomplish in this thread besides being an irritant?

 

[Randall]

Libet's response to those who read his experimental results as proof of no free will in consciousness was to point out that the experiments could not measure 'free won't' -- a conscious decision such as we've all experienced not to follow through with an impulse to do or say something ...

There's no reason to think that the decision not to do something or to change one's mind isn't already formed prior to our becoming aware of it either. It's simple logic.

addendum: Your reference to "Constance's phenomenological jargon," intended to bite me ...

Nothing was intended to "bite you". My mention of you was in fact an acknowledgement. Every field of interest or study has its own particular jargon and I was using the word in this sense:

Jargon

1. specialist language: language that is used by a particular group, profession, or culture, especially when the words and phrases are not understood or used by other people ( Encarta ).

I wish you would try harder not to assume the worst in my intentions. I'm just trying to advance my understanding along specific lines of inquiry. You and others have helped in that effort more than once, but that doesn't mean that I'll climb on board with everything that might be proposed along the way, especially when I see problems with it. And when I happen disagree, I'm not trying to target you or anyone else on a personal level.

 

[smcder]

Got to this from conscious entities ... interesting site, something of the structure I'd like to see on the site I'm building:

Aeon Ideas

 

[smcder]

Back on track with Gallagher's Brainstorming (p 99): "A Larger System"

embodied, embedded, enactive approaches:

• perceptual consciousness is not divorced from movement and action.
• perceptual consciousness is clearly a bodily process
• necessarily ego/soma- -centrically perspectival

“The late Francisco Varela was certainly one of the most respected scientists participating in these debates about consciousness.”

Daniel Dennett on Varela:

• There are striking parallels between Francisco’s ‘Emergent Mind’ and my ‘Joycean Machines’
• Varela's a revolutionary and I’m a reformer
• the problem with revolutionary is that the establishment must be non-reformable
• so everything has to start from scratch
• Varela and Dennett are talking about the same issues
• Dennett wants to retain and reform what’s gone before
• Varela wants to discard it.

 

[Constance]

There's no reason to think that the decision not to do something or to change one's mind isn't already formed prior to our becoming aware of it either. It's simple logic.

So you think there's a little homunculus inside your head making all your choices in life?

Nothing was intended to "bite you". My mention of you was in fact an acknowledgement. Every field of interest or study has its own particular jargon and I was using the word in this sense:

A poorly disguised crock of the genuine article. Talk to the wall, randel.

I wish you would try harder not to assume the worst in my intentions. I'm just trying to advance my understanding along specific lines of inquiry. You and others have helped in that effort more than once, but that doesn't mean that I'll climb on board with everything that might be proposed along the way, especially when I see problems with it. And when I happen disagree, I'm not trying to target you or anyone else on a personal level.

What were you disagreeing with? The phenomenological distinction between prereflective and reflective consciousness? I don't think that distinction was an issue in the post you were reacting to. And even if it was, why comment on me in your response?

Sometimes I think you grew up on another planet.

 

[Randall]

So you think ...

You got the first three words right. After that it all goes downhill rather quickly. But I suppose I shouldn't have expected much else. After all since your mind was already made up before you were even aware of it, what possible chance might I have had of changing your opinion .

 

[Constance]

You're not funny, randle. You're suffocating. You've changed the tone and atmosphere of what had been a pleasant and productive conversation in this thread since December 2013. Since you seem to want to dig in here, I'll take the path of least resistance and leave now by the nearest exit.

 

[Randall]

I've got the website started ... one of the topics is avian intelligence ... birds have apparently evolved an equivalent to the mammalian neocortex, only it's much smaller so that it's much lighter because birds have to conserve weight ... the crux of it is, if this evolved independently and birds have self-awareness (mirror test) and there are no zombie birds ... then do we have one more question about epiphenomenalism?

Yes. Too bad you don't get video. I posted one where a crow solves an 8 step problem to get at some food, and is ( reportedly ) the only other creature known besides humans to create hooked tools.

You're not funny, randle. You're suffocating. You've changed the tone and atmosphere of what had been a pleasant and productive conversation in this thread since December 2013. Since you seem to want to dig in here, I'll take the path of least resistance and leave now by the nearest exit.

I would say something, but since her mind was made up before she was even aware of it ...

 

[smcder]

Interview with Franscisco Varela from Gallagher's Brainstorming (bottom of page 99ff)

Varela:

• lived through the cognitive revolution and the displacement of the computational and connectionist schools
• embodied cognitive science (The Embodied Mind Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991) is the most important development
• in the 1970s consciousness was mystical, the concern of philosophers
• but in the late 80the idea that one could learn many things about consciousness started to grow: then we started thinking in different ways about how movement comes about, how memory is constructed, how the emotions work, how the various capacities of cognitive life can be articulated. There is no agreement on anything, of course.
• "Wherever we find the right kind of cognitive apparatus, however, this unique phenomenon appears, the phenomenon of lived experience, or to use Thomas Nagel’s expression, the phenomenon of ‘what it is like’ to be consciously in the world."

Gallagher

• It continues to be a problem with no solution.

Varela:

"David Chalmers caught the right phrase at the right time – the ‘hard problem’, which is the problem of the emergence of consciousness, which is really
the deep question: What is consciousness? The problem is that many of the scientists and the philosophers embrace the reductionist program and are motivated by the desire to discover the so-called NCC circuits. Francis Crick, for example, studied the brain with the hope of identifying the precise circuits responsible for the phenomenon of consciousness. We are, he says, nothing but a bunch of neurons.

Decidedly reductionistic. I don’t mean to denigrate this work; science needs to be reductionistic in part. But we are certainly more than a bunch of neurons, and we need to be interested in the extra-neural aspects of consciousness. I don’t deny that the concept of the NCC is an essential element in this quest. But other strategies are important."